From cives Romani to Cymry. Ethnic processes and identity construction in Western Britain between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press 

Series: Clio. Essays in History, Archaeology and Art History

Pages: 432

Language: Italian

Abstract: The transition of Britain from Roman rule to the Early Middle Ages has long been described as a dark age, marked by a power vacuum filled only by invasions and ruin. This book seeks to overturn this perspective, analysing post-Roman Britain as a vibrant laboratory of cultural identities. Through an interdisciplinary analysis that weaves together archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence, the volume traces the metamorphosis of elites and social structures in the western regions of the island between the fourth and tenth centuries. From the transformation of provincial aristocracies to the emergence of the local church, from "big men" who adorned themselves with Roman titles to the birth of a new collective identity of "compatriots" (Cymry), the book explores how a sense of community enabled Romano-British elites to resist and redefine themselves during the turbulent centuries that marked the end of Roman Britain and the dawn of the political mosaic of medieval England, Wales, and Cornwall. Through an in-depth examination of the sources, the book analyses how the memory of Romanitas was dismantled and reassembled to give rise to new forms of collective identities. From the fierce invective of Gildas, which transforms the political crisis into an influential moral and religious drama, to the anti-British systematization operated by Bede, up to the extraordinary synthesis of the Historia Brittonum, where myth and history merge to legitimize the ideological position of the Britons, the book retraces the key stages of a complex history of identity construction and oppositional representations: a literary ethnogenesis that lasted for centuries and remains ongoing.